Anatomy of a Con: The Oma Hamou Story
The following was sent to us. We thought it was well written and of interest to the subject.
WE DID NOT WRITE THIS PIECE. WE CAN NOT GUARANTEE THAT IT IS THE TRUTH. You are free to decide for yourself what you believe.
***
Anatomy of a Con:
The Oma Hamou Story
On November 2, 2008 a woman named Alexandra Oma McConnell was arrested in San Bernardino County, California for felony forgery. For the next six weeks Ms. McConnell, who was also living as Alexandra Murphy, sat in jail with bail set at one million dollars. Today she is in pre-trial proceedings on that felony charge.
Over the years, Ms. McConnell has gone by many names, including Oma Demian, Oma Ashkenazy, Oma Chedid, Rebecca Taylor, Taylor Jordan, and variants. But the name she most preferred – and the name under which this story unfolds – is Oma Hamou.
This is the story of a grifter, but a grifter with a twist. While most grifters run their confidence games simply as a means to live, Oma Hamou had dreams. She was going to be a movie star, a film producer, an international business executive, and a woman to whom powerful men would turn to pour out their hearts and open their wallets. She was going to Hollywood.
This is not the first time this tale has been told about Hollywood. And it is not the first time the tale has been infused with deep psychosis. But it is perhaps the first time the psychosis has been manifested as a fantasy about a defunct royal dynasty, where the antagonist dresses herself in imperial regalia, where she takes the name of a dead empress, where she posts on the internet her fantasies of being a reincarnated Romanov – and where she actually dwells so deep inside the fantasy that she will risk prison in increasingly desperate attempts to maintain her own distorted reality, heedless of the cost to a long roster of victims.
Oma Hamou was born as Oma Louise McConnell on August 1, 1963 in Charleston, West Virginia. Little is known of her early years, other than hints of some sort of domestic abuse she claimed as a young girl. She first showed up in the public record as Oma McConnell when she was apprehended in 1983 in Los Angeles while posing as a catering employee to gain entry to a reception Nancy Reagan was giving for Queen Elizabeth. This was the first sign of Oma Hamou’s pathological obsession with royalty, the obsession around which the tale of this grift will unfold.
The next few years are somewhat hazy, as she lived and worked under various names. That period did produce a series of soft-core pornography shots of her in various states of undress and provocative poses which even today, some twenty-plus years later, she continues to post on the internet. At only 5’0” and with a rather extreme jaw line, she remained on the periphery of the “art” industry, using her work there primarily as the basis for future claims that she was a professional model and film actress. Over the years, even though she trumpets her modeling and film work in a series of self-promoting internet sites, she has steadfastly refused to furnish actual film or modeling credits.
The early 1990’s were somewhat rough for Oma. The bloom was off the lily for work in the “art” industry, and she had to find another means of support. She became the tenth wife of a much older man, and the marriage ended in fireworks as Oma accumulated a string of felony convictions for passing bad checks that her husband would not honor, and she then accused her husband of child molestation. Fleeing the terms of her probation, she several times found herself in jail awaiting extradition and probation violation hearings.
By the late 1990’s, Oma had dusted herself off and moved into the home of another very elderly and rather senile man. This time she fared somewhat better, finding that the man had significant assets she could access by forging his name on checks and opening credit accounts in his name. With access to these funds, she could at last begin the grift to fund her fantasy in earnest. So she began to assemble the pieces of the marketing façade she would use to bill herself as a well-connected, heavily-funded film impresario about to produce a major film on the final years of Russia’s Romanov dynasty. She, of course, would star in the film as Her Imperial Majesty, the Empress Alexandra.
The first step was to have a script at hand for the movie project. She embezzled funds from her elderly housemate’s business accounts to pay a writer to produce a script for the movie, entitled A Matter of Honour. (When the old gentleman’s family found out about the theft, they contacted the Elder Abuse Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department, which determined a scam was underway but could not be prosecuted because the primary witness was too senile to be an effective witness.)
To establish her credentials as a businesswoman, Ms. Hamou contracted with Global Insight to produce an economic impact report. Using data and assumptions fed to them by Ms. Hamou, this report calculated an economic value to the Russian economy of tens of millions of dollars deriving from the major motion picture Ms. Hamou was going to film on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. (Global Insight eventually sued Ms. Hamou for non-payment of the $60,000 she owed them for this report, and they demanded that she cease to use it in promoting her project. She continued to publish the report on the internet. The judgment in favor of Global Insight has never been paid.)
She then provided Dunn & Bradstreet with a series of fabricated facts about a film company with one hundred employees, a large production facility, and serious financial backing. Dunn & Bradstreet dutifully issued a listing reflecting these claims. (Dunn & Bradstreet eventually discovered that the data had been fabricated and rescinded its rating of Ms. Hamou’s faked enterprise. In fact, Oma Hamou did hire several people for a short period of time. She used their social security numbers to obtain personal American Express credit cards in their names – but she had the billing sent to her – and she promptly ran up around $400,000 in charges. American Express sued her, the elderly gentleman, and two of her “employees”. The two “employees” were later dropped from the judgment, as they were able to prove they were unaware of the charges placed in their names. The elderly gentleman was held liable, as Ms. Hamou was living with him and used his address to obtain the cards. The American Express judgment has never been paid.)
Ms. Hamou then had herself photographed in full costume as the Empress Alexandra and purchased a series of full-page ads in the entertainment industry newspaper Variety. (The publisher of Variety eventually sued Ms. Hamou for failing to pay for these ads. That judgment has never been paid.)
She also created a sham charity, called the Sarskaia Foundation, of which she appointed herself Chairwoman and which put itself forward on the internet as an organization that channeled large funds to Russia for the restoration of its imperial architectural heritage. (The phone number of the charity rang to a community bank in Los Angeles which had never heard of the Sarskaia Foundation or of its Chairwoman Oma Hamou.)
She wrote a self-promoting article about herself, discussing her many business ventures, her world travels, her grand movie project, and her associations with powerful politicians and churchmen in Russia and the United States. (She claimed the article was authored by a journalist named Nitzana Kedem. While she perhaps thought it clever to use a Jewish-sounding name when trying to promote herself to the film industry, the name Nitzana Kedem was actually an amalgam of an Israeli grocery store chain and a campaign of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.)
The final stage was to produce a trailer for the movie. Knowing that nothing sells film like film, Ms. Hamou contracted for sound stages, for costuming and hairdressing, and for other associated services. (Checks were written on a closed bank account, lawsuits proceeded, and the Irvine, California Police were eventually called in. Ms. Hamou lost the lawsuits, never paid the judgments, and only avoided prosecution for the bad checks by making good on the debt to Wild West Productions, which was to produce the trailer.)
The ducks were now all in a row to move on to the next stage of the scam. Ms. Hamou contacted a man named Robert Atchison and put him under contract for $7,000 a month to be her chief consultant on the film project. Mr. Atchison was a recognized specialist on Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, and he owned the largest and most heavily-visited history site on the internet: “The Alexander Palace”, named for the principal residence of the last tsar.
Mr. Atchison had broad and deep connections in Russia with authorities charged with the preservation and development of the former imperial complex in Pushkin, Russia, as well as with senior people in the Russian Orthodox Church. Ms. Hamou asked to be introduced to these people, which Mr. Atchison did.
Ms. Hamou promptly set her plan in motion. She hired a Russian public relations firm, provided them with the faked Global Insight economic impact report, the fraudulently-obtained Dunn & Bradstreet rating, the unpaid ad coverage from Variety, the movie script paid for with stolen funds, and other faked credentials. Backed by these proofs of her considerable financial means and her intent to do great things for the advancement of Russian imperial history, the public relations firm succeeded in getting Ms. Hamou considerable print and television coverage in St. Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia.
To reinforce the façade that she was a major new player on the scene of Romanov history, Ms. Hamou claimed to have a sixty-million-dollar “trust fund” at hand to finance her film project and to fund the restoration of the Feodorovsky Cathedral and the Alexander Palace, which would be used as sets for her motion picture epic. The Russians, both desperate for funds to halt the decay of their beloved monuments and somewhat naïve about western business practices, took her at her word. Both the Feodorovsky Cathedral and the Alexander Palace hired work crews and began repairs on the promise from Ms. Hamou that funds would be placed at their disposal immediately.
And here the façade hiding Ms. Hamou’s private pathological fantasy of a personal connection to royalty and her desperate desire to be a movie star and film producer began to fall apart. There were, of course, no funds behind any of the promises. And bills – real, live bills – were coming due.
Ms. Hamou’s first impulse was to attempt to buy time. She was beset by a string of sudden illnesses, car accidents, misdirected mail, just-missed calls, bank mistakes, and personal emergencies of friends and family. As people who had incurred their own liabilities in reliance on her promises began to suspect they had been scammed, they turned to Mr. Atchison, their friend and the man who had brought Oma Hamou into their lives.
Mr. Atchison, in an attempt to protect his reputation and to make amends to victims where he could, began to warn his associates of Ms. Hamou’s fraudulent activities. Ms. Hamou responded with fusillades of attacks on Mr. Atchison, calling his customers, launching internet attacks on him, and otherwise claiming he was defaming her. In an attempt to procure payment for his own services, he sued Ms. Hamou and won the case by jury verdict.
Ms. Hamou has been sued approximately a dozen times and has lost every suit. In most cases, she never bothered to show for trial, knowing she had neither means nor intent to pay any judgment. Where she found trial unavoidable, she worked through lawyers, absenting herself from the courtroom as often as possible with claims of recurrent illness or accident. (Two of her lawyers have sued their own client for non-payment for their services.)
In almost every case, Ms. Hamou has ignored the judgment against her and moved on with her life and scams. But the lawsuit by Mr. Atchison was another matter. This was a man who occupied the position she desperately craved – to be recognized as an authority on late Romanov history and as the chief American advocate of the restoration of the dynasty’s last residence. She could tolerate lawsuits by others with equanimity. But to have Mr. Atchison – the man who had turned on her when her scam in Pushkin imperiled his own reputation – sue her was just not to be borne. So she traveled to Texas, where she personally but unsuccessfully defended the lawsuit.
Coming off that loss, she embarked on an unrelenting, psychologically unhinged, and defamatory campaign to do anything she could to strike at someone she perceives as the most mortal of enemies: the man who unmasked her psychotic fantasy as the scam it was from the very beginning.
Even today, as she awaits trial on yet another felony charge that could well send her to prison, she spends her time launching website after website attacking Mr. Atchison and his associates. Her life continues to unravel. She has been living in hiding under an assumed name with another convicted forger. She was arrested recently for driving without license, registration, or insurance. Yet she spends hour after hour, day in and day out, posting on the internet about Mr. Atchison and his associates. She will not stop. She cannot stop.
This is the anatomy of a con. This is the Oma Hamou story.
WE DID NOT WRITE THIS PIECE. WE CAN NOT GUARANTEE THAT IT IS THE TRUTH. You are free to decide for yourself what you believe.
***
Anatomy of a Con:
The Oma Hamou Story
On November 2, 2008 a woman named Alexandra Oma McConnell was arrested in San Bernardino County, California for felony forgery. For the next six weeks Ms. McConnell, who was also living as Alexandra Murphy, sat in jail with bail set at one million dollars. Today she is in pre-trial proceedings on that felony charge.
Over the years, Ms. McConnell has gone by many names, including Oma Demian, Oma Ashkenazy, Oma Chedid, Rebecca Taylor, Taylor Jordan, and variants. But the name she most preferred – and the name under which this story unfolds – is Oma Hamou.
This is the story of a grifter, but a grifter with a twist. While most grifters run their confidence games simply as a means to live, Oma Hamou had dreams. She was going to be a movie star, a film producer, an international business executive, and a woman to whom powerful men would turn to pour out their hearts and open their wallets. She was going to Hollywood.
This is not the first time this tale has been told about Hollywood. And it is not the first time the tale has been infused with deep psychosis. But it is perhaps the first time the psychosis has been manifested as a fantasy about a defunct royal dynasty, where the antagonist dresses herself in imperial regalia, where she takes the name of a dead empress, where she posts on the internet her fantasies of being a reincarnated Romanov – and where she actually dwells so deep inside the fantasy that she will risk prison in increasingly desperate attempts to maintain her own distorted reality, heedless of the cost to a long roster of victims.
Oma Hamou was born as Oma Louise McConnell on August 1, 1963 in Charleston, West Virginia. Little is known of her early years, other than hints of some sort of domestic abuse she claimed as a young girl. She first showed up in the public record as Oma McConnell when she was apprehended in 1983 in Los Angeles while posing as a catering employee to gain entry to a reception Nancy Reagan was giving for Queen Elizabeth. This was the first sign of Oma Hamou’s pathological obsession with royalty, the obsession around which the tale of this grift will unfold.
The next few years are somewhat hazy, as she lived and worked under various names. That period did produce a series of soft-core pornography shots of her in various states of undress and provocative poses which even today, some twenty-plus years later, she continues to post on the internet. At only 5’0” and with a rather extreme jaw line, she remained on the periphery of the “art” industry, using her work there primarily as the basis for future claims that she was a professional model and film actress. Over the years, even though she trumpets her modeling and film work in a series of self-promoting internet sites, she has steadfastly refused to furnish actual film or modeling credits.
The early 1990’s were somewhat rough for Oma. The bloom was off the lily for work in the “art” industry, and she had to find another means of support. She became the tenth wife of a much older man, and the marriage ended in fireworks as Oma accumulated a string of felony convictions for passing bad checks that her husband would not honor, and she then accused her husband of child molestation. Fleeing the terms of her probation, she several times found herself in jail awaiting extradition and probation violation hearings.
By the late 1990’s, Oma had dusted herself off and moved into the home of another very elderly and rather senile man. This time she fared somewhat better, finding that the man had significant assets she could access by forging his name on checks and opening credit accounts in his name. With access to these funds, she could at last begin the grift to fund her fantasy in earnest. So she began to assemble the pieces of the marketing façade she would use to bill herself as a well-connected, heavily-funded film impresario about to produce a major film on the final years of Russia’s Romanov dynasty. She, of course, would star in the film as Her Imperial Majesty, the Empress Alexandra.
The first step was to have a script at hand for the movie project. She embezzled funds from her elderly housemate’s business accounts to pay a writer to produce a script for the movie, entitled A Matter of Honour. (When the old gentleman’s family found out about the theft, they contacted the Elder Abuse Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department, which determined a scam was underway but could not be prosecuted because the primary witness was too senile to be an effective witness.)
To establish her credentials as a businesswoman, Ms. Hamou contracted with Global Insight to produce an economic impact report. Using data and assumptions fed to them by Ms. Hamou, this report calculated an economic value to the Russian economy of tens of millions of dollars deriving from the major motion picture Ms. Hamou was going to film on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. (Global Insight eventually sued Ms. Hamou for non-payment of the $60,000 she owed them for this report, and they demanded that she cease to use it in promoting her project. She continued to publish the report on the internet. The judgment in favor of Global Insight has never been paid.)
She then provided Dunn & Bradstreet with a series of fabricated facts about a film company with one hundred employees, a large production facility, and serious financial backing. Dunn & Bradstreet dutifully issued a listing reflecting these claims. (Dunn & Bradstreet eventually discovered that the data had been fabricated and rescinded its rating of Ms. Hamou’s faked enterprise. In fact, Oma Hamou did hire several people for a short period of time. She used their social security numbers to obtain personal American Express credit cards in their names – but she had the billing sent to her – and she promptly ran up around $400,000 in charges. American Express sued her, the elderly gentleman, and two of her “employees”. The two “employees” were later dropped from the judgment, as they were able to prove they were unaware of the charges placed in their names. The elderly gentleman was held liable, as Ms. Hamou was living with him and used his address to obtain the cards. The American Express judgment has never been paid.)
Ms. Hamou then had herself photographed in full costume as the Empress Alexandra and purchased a series of full-page ads in the entertainment industry newspaper Variety. (The publisher of Variety eventually sued Ms. Hamou for failing to pay for these ads. That judgment has never been paid.)
She also created a sham charity, called the Sarskaia Foundation, of which she appointed herself Chairwoman and which put itself forward on the internet as an organization that channeled large funds to Russia for the restoration of its imperial architectural heritage. (The phone number of the charity rang to a community bank in Los Angeles which had never heard of the Sarskaia Foundation or of its Chairwoman Oma Hamou.)
She wrote a self-promoting article about herself, discussing her many business ventures, her world travels, her grand movie project, and her associations with powerful politicians and churchmen in Russia and the United States. (She claimed the article was authored by a journalist named Nitzana Kedem. While she perhaps thought it clever to use a Jewish-sounding name when trying to promote herself to the film industry, the name Nitzana Kedem was actually an amalgam of an Israeli grocery store chain and a campaign of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.)
The final stage was to produce a trailer for the movie. Knowing that nothing sells film like film, Ms. Hamou contracted for sound stages, for costuming and hairdressing, and for other associated services. (Checks were written on a closed bank account, lawsuits proceeded, and the Irvine, California Police were eventually called in. Ms. Hamou lost the lawsuits, never paid the judgments, and only avoided prosecution for the bad checks by making good on the debt to Wild West Productions, which was to produce the trailer.)
The ducks were now all in a row to move on to the next stage of the scam. Ms. Hamou contacted a man named Robert Atchison and put him under contract for $7,000 a month to be her chief consultant on the film project. Mr. Atchison was a recognized specialist on Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, and he owned the largest and most heavily-visited history site on the internet: “The Alexander Palace”, named for the principal residence of the last tsar.
Mr. Atchison had broad and deep connections in Russia with authorities charged with the preservation and development of the former imperial complex in Pushkin, Russia, as well as with senior people in the Russian Orthodox Church. Ms. Hamou asked to be introduced to these people, which Mr. Atchison did.
Ms. Hamou promptly set her plan in motion. She hired a Russian public relations firm, provided them with the faked Global Insight economic impact report, the fraudulently-obtained Dunn & Bradstreet rating, the unpaid ad coverage from Variety, the movie script paid for with stolen funds, and other faked credentials. Backed by these proofs of her considerable financial means and her intent to do great things for the advancement of Russian imperial history, the public relations firm succeeded in getting Ms. Hamou considerable print and television coverage in St. Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia.
To reinforce the façade that she was a major new player on the scene of Romanov history, Ms. Hamou claimed to have a sixty-million-dollar “trust fund” at hand to finance her film project and to fund the restoration of the Feodorovsky Cathedral and the Alexander Palace, which would be used as sets for her motion picture epic. The Russians, both desperate for funds to halt the decay of their beloved monuments and somewhat naïve about western business practices, took her at her word. Both the Feodorovsky Cathedral and the Alexander Palace hired work crews and began repairs on the promise from Ms. Hamou that funds would be placed at their disposal immediately.
And here the façade hiding Ms. Hamou’s private pathological fantasy of a personal connection to royalty and her desperate desire to be a movie star and film producer began to fall apart. There were, of course, no funds behind any of the promises. And bills – real, live bills – were coming due.
Ms. Hamou’s first impulse was to attempt to buy time. She was beset by a string of sudden illnesses, car accidents, misdirected mail, just-missed calls, bank mistakes, and personal emergencies of friends and family. As people who had incurred their own liabilities in reliance on her promises began to suspect they had been scammed, they turned to Mr. Atchison, their friend and the man who had brought Oma Hamou into their lives.
Mr. Atchison, in an attempt to protect his reputation and to make amends to victims where he could, began to warn his associates of Ms. Hamou’s fraudulent activities. Ms. Hamou responded with fusillades of attacks on Mr. Atchison, calling his customers, launching internet attacks on him, and otherwise claiming he was defaming her. In an attempt to procure payment for his own services, he sued Ms. Hamou and won the case by jury verdict.
Ms. Hamou has been sued approximately a dozen times and has lost every suit. In most cases, she never bothered to show for trial, knowing she had neither means nor intent to pay any judgment. Where she found trial unavoidable, she worked through lawyers, absenting herself from the courtroom as often as possible with claims of recurrent illness or accident. (Two of her lawyers have sued their own client for non-payment for their services.)
In almost every case, Ms. Hamou has ignored the judgment against her and moved on with her life and scams. But the lawsuit by Mr. Atchison was another matter. This was a man who occupied the position she desperately craved – to be recognized as an authority on late Romanov history and as the chief American advocate of the restoration of the dynasty’s last residence. She could tolerate lawsuits by others with equanimity. But to have Mr. Atchison – the man who had turned on her when her scam in Pushkin imperiled his own reputation – sue her was just not to be borne. So she traveled to Texas, where she personally but unsuccessfully defended the lawsuit.
Coming off that loss, she embarked on an unrelenting, psychologically unhinged, and defamatory campaign to do anything she could to strike at someone she perceives as the most mortal of enemies: the man who unmasked her psychotic fantasy as the scam it was from the very beginning.
Even today, as she awaits trial on yet another felony charge that could well send her to prison, she spends her time launching website after website attacking Mr. Atchison and his associates. Her life continues to unravel. She has been living in hiding under an assumed name with another convicted forger. She was arrested recently for driving without license, registration, or insurance. Yet she spends hour after hour, day in and day out, posting on the internet about Mr. Atchison and his associates. She will not stop. She cannot stop.
This is the anatomy of a con. This is the Oma Hamou story.
posted by Watchtower at 11:34 AM
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